Urban League joins fight for black history museum

By REBEKAH DENN, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Published 9:00 pm, Tuesday, March 26, 2002

The Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle is the latest player in a tortured quest to redevelop the blighted Colman School building -- and the effort is coming closer than any other attempt has to making plans for an African American museum a reality.

The property on the Interstate 90 lid would become the Urban League Village at Colman School, a mixed-use project that would include the long-sought community museum in the historic brick school.

"This is the most exciting thing I have seen happen in the Central District in my memory," Carver Gayton, a co-chairman of the project's fund-raising committee, said yesterday.

He spoke at a luncheon kicking off a major capital campaign that includes naming rights for everything from apartments (as low as $10,000) to the building itself ($2 million-plus).

The Urban League has raised about $700,000 to date toward the building's $1.2 million purchase price, President James Kelly said yesterday. The Seattle City Council awarded it $400,000 last year for project planning. The University of Washington, which has been working on how to connect the building to the broader community, will hold a public meeting April 5 to share ideas.

And the league has gathered an array of community leaders to support its plans, including former Mayor Norm Rice.

But the project is far from a done deal, and the original backers say they will never let it come to pass. In 1985, activists broke into the vacant Colman School and demanded it be turned into a museum. Some of the activists stayed there for eight years, until the city finally agreed to back the project.

"We're going to see them in court and in the streets," Omari Tahir-Garrett, one of the past leaders of the museum effort, said yesterday. Garrett was among those who occupied the school.

Garrett said the Urban League didn't fight for the building or come up with the concept and doesn't have true support from the black community.

"They've always been lackeys for the white folks, the white business interests," said Garrett, who became known last year when he was charged with assaulting then-Mayor Paul Schell at a rally in the Central District.

Earl Debnam, an original backer who stayed on a cot at the school for eight years, said: "It's a wrong approach they're (the Urban League) taking. I don't think it's respectful to all the work we have put into that effort."

Garrett has sued Seattle Public Schools, and he and supporters frequently attend School Board meetings to protest the sale of the building, saying they are the rightful leaders of the project and that adding commercial elements to the museum is an unnecessary corruption.

"It doesn't have to be contaminated by capitalism," Debnam said.

But Kelly and other supporters say the museum will only be feasible if it is subsidized through the rentals and businesses.

The Urban League plans call for a $17 million redevelopment that would include an African American museum, commercial space and about 40 apartments that include both low-income and market-rate rents.

Kelly called the project a "cultural gateway" and community landmark that will help rejoin a community that was divided by I-90.

The elementary school, built in 1909 in the neighborhood bridging the Central District and Rainier Valley, closed in 1985.

Seattle Public Schools agreed to sell the building to museum backers, including the original activists, in 1997. But the museum board became embroiled in disputes and claims of financial mismanagement, with two different groups claiming to be the true board leaders.

The school district began accepting other bids in 2000 after the museum group failed to come up with the specified purchase price of $471,000.

The Urban League now has an agreement to buy the property for $1.2 million -- though it may try to negotiate the price downward after discovering the building needs about $100,000 worth of cleanup to get rid of pigeon excrement and other debris.

The league must come up with the purchase money by the end of the year or the deal is off, according to the district.

"(Colman) is clearly a building we would like to see utilized," City Councilman Richard McIver said. "I would guess that the feasibility of the pure museum being able to support itself would be slim to none. I think mixed use makes perfect sense."

The Urban League can't escape questions about the project's past. Urban League trustee Herman McKinney, for instance, asked yesterday what would happen to people who had donated substantial amounts toward the project's past incarnations. The Urban League doesn't have the money and doesn't expect to ever see it, although they said past donors may be able to get credited somehow in the new building.

Sharon Sutton, director of the University of Washington's Center for Environment, Education, and Design Studies, said she expected skepticism about the project when her students began interviewing community members about ideas for the "village." On the whole, though, the reaction's been hopeful, she said.

"I think there's a lot of delayed enthusiasm over a 25-year period of waiting for something to happen," she said. "The building is such an icon."